Day: September 25, 2004

Legendary words from Alec Baldwin….seriously: “Movie marketers are taking actors and they’re kind of inserting them like suppositories into the cavities of the moviegoing public. The business is so kind of self-referential now. There’s a whole kind of industry now about the forensics of the business, so to speak, that wasn’t there 20 years ago.” So what’s a site like Hollywood Elsewhere in this rear equation? Not a lubricant…that’s E.T., People, Entertainment Weekly, etc. I don’t think I’m even wearing the plastic gloves.

Any talented 20-something web designers out there living on a trust fund with a little extra time on their hands? Two regular columns a week plus WIRED every day plus editing the other columnists plus assembling each page with jpegs and whatnot…I’m losing it. This isn’t whining — it’s fact. You could be from Botswana…I just need some help.

The first words…the first sound…in I Heart Huckabees is a rapid-fire obscenity spew from the mouth of Jason Schwartzman. It’s brash, funny…sets the tone. But it was probably borrowed. John Malkovich’s character in the original 1987 Circle Rep production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This made his entrance with the very same bit. Did David O. Russell (then 29 years old) ever catch a performance?

Critical reactions to The Motorcycle Diaries have been mostly admiring (like mine), but the political legacy of the real-life Che Guevara is taking bites here and there. Daily News critic Bob Strauss complains that it’s “a feel-good movie about a guy who helped to establish the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, for which he killed many and ordered the executions of many more.” And Salon‘s Paul Berman laments that “the cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. [He] was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction in Cuba. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s ‘labor camp’ system…that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.” Yikes…